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Comment by bryanhm | Hacker News Reader

Here we have what I think is a display of an intelligent mind specialized in one area, funded by a state institution, and weak at resolving moral conflicts. Computer scientists (and any self-respecting scientists) HAVE to separate their ethics from the interests of state institutions. Phrases in the paper resembling something like "where the cryptographer has a duty to serve the public and keep their self-interest in check" indicate this. I've read a paper recently on designing systems to have security exceptions for law enforcement and calling them "exception requirements" or something to that effect. This is the sort of thing a good study of ethics can help to resolve.

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  Computer scientists (and any self-respecting scientists) HAVE to separate their ethics from the interests of state institutions.

Why? The paper argues exactly to the opposite in the first part, describing the atomic-bomb scientists, and the Russell-Einstein Manifesto.

In my opinion, cryptographers and computer scientists have ignored morally questioning their work for too long. Reality is now catching up on this, with techniques for surveillance. The paper argues this for cryptography, in my view this is even more generally applicable.

Why do scientists/cryptographers have to judge ethics for themselves? Not sure what you're asking. Bertrand Russell judged the bomb to be a danger for humanity and chose to express his own views on it.

Medical ethics committees have ethicists, but the main advice is from medical experts. I would not want anybody else judging the ethics of medical experiments, as no one else has the expert knowledge. I see absolutely no reason why this should different for computer scientists and cryptographers.

No one else understands the implications of an experiment or a new methodology. I was at a meeting recently discussing ethics committees for computer science. A medical expert gave his opinion and said (paraphrasing): I fail to see the problem with digitalisation, we have had medical records on paper for years, now they are on a computer, what is the difference?

I don't mean to say that every scientist should do this individually. They should discuss this with colleagues, and with an ethics committee, which should contain subject matter experts, but also ethicists.

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